The world has been saved, the internet been restored. We have been converted to complete people again.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a phone. My dad didn't really like idea of it, I think. It was a kind of intrusion and, more importantly, an unnecessary expense (my parents were extremely short of money all the way through my childhood, although I didn't realise it at the time). It also, at the time, wasn't necessary. In that context, it's almost frightening how integral having an online connection 24/7 has become to our lives. I'm not that old. Yet twenty-some years ago, people could function perfectly fine without a telephone.

I think I probably spend most of my waking time looking at a computer screen. Eight hours a day at work, my eyes don't drift for more than a few seconds from the screen. Then there's typing in fiction (at least we allow ourselves to get away from the computer for an hour in the morning to write in a cafe) and often watching a DVD on the computer in the evening. I also read a significant proportion of my fiction and all my news from the computer screen. It's not healthy, not mentally, not physically. I feel like a cartoon prisoner with an iron ball strapped to my ankle. And a whole lot of it's voluntary imprisonment.

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Feeling neglected by editors again. All my finished stories have been sitting at one magazine or another for (relative) ages. I've probably said this multiple times before, but I seem to have an ability to make markets spend far longer than average on considering my stories. This is either bad luck or that I write stories that teeter on the cusp of being good enough to buy, but not often teetering over. I guess it's better than being rejected straight away all the time, but I'd love to be able to force myself past that point so editors don't um and ah about the stories before deciding. Still, I guess we'd all like that.

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Our alarm didn't go off this morning so I wasn't up early enough to do the writing session before work. I had forgotten how much a day sucks when I haven't had an hour to write first. If I've done an hour first, then no matter how much the rest of the day might suck, at least I know I've achieved something I want to that day. Otherwise, it seems like I'm just treading water until tomorrow.

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On happier news, Steph and I have been treating ourselves to blackberry pancakes. Steph has them with maple syrup, but that's too smokey for me, so I use golden syrup. Unhealthy but delicious.